A Most Strange Fight Between Killers
by Terra Cloud
Summary: Something's outside the window, the girl realised. Determined not to let this dream become a nightmare, she decided to let the creature in. Rated M for violence and various methods of torture.


The girl was heavily ensconced in a headphoned world. Specifically, Welcome to Nightvale. She could hear nothing externally except for the deep, smooth voice of Cecil Gershwyn Palmer, that voice which had an almost hypnotic quality to it and was doing a fairly good job of distracting her from the various noises she was hearing internally.

Internally she could hear many things, but thanks to the voice of Cecil she had managed to force it to become a sort of background noise that she only accidentally payed attention to every twenty seconds or so. She didn't want to pay attention to the turmoil inside her brain, since it was making her feel guilty, and yet as the night wore on and she noticed the little clock in the corner of her laptop screen change from 2:31 am to 2:32 am, and as Cecil's voice slowly lulled her into a drifting consciousness barely awake, the voices became louder and louder in her head until she could no longer ignore them.

_You do realise you have an essay for Media due tomorrow that you haven't started yet, right?_ nagged the part of her that was Common Sense.

_But I don't even know what I'm going to write_, she replied. _Besides, I'm tired. I should go to sleep._

Cecil's beautiful voice mingled with the various cursing words Common Sense hurled at her. _No goddamn excuse. DO THE FUCKING ESSAY._

_C'mon, let her sleep. She's obviously tired,_ intoned a gentler part of her mind.

_Not even a nap?_ The girl enquired. _I promise to start writing at three._

_You said you'd write it as soon as you got home. After you checked your emails. Tumblr. Gaia. Pottermore. After dinner. At midnight. At two. Write the fucking essay now, you moron, or you'll never- Awww, Cecil's talking about Carlos again!_

_That's so cuuute!_ replied the girl. She had a momentary reprieve from the assault she was receiving from her own mind as they listened to Cecil describe Carlos' beautiful, perfect hair.

_Okay, that's done. Now concentrate and write your fucking essay._

The girl felt sleep slowly pressing a pillow over her eyelids, and felt them suffocate and die and fall over her eyes, struggling to focus and stay open. The light of the laptop screen seemed to flicker as her eyelids attempted to resist sleep's attack, and her thoughts steadily became harder to catch, like iridescent fish.

_Okay, no, that's not working,_ she slurred mentally. _Can't I sleep for a little?_

_Only if you set an alarm_, Common Sense relented.

_But if I do that,_ she exclaimed, _I'll wake up!_

Common Sense sighed. _We're going to get nowhere with this, aren't we? You'd think what with me being you, I'd know this was useless by now... Whatever, go fail the year. You suck._

_Since you're me, that's means you suck too_, the girl retorted.

_Shutup. I'm not the one sacrificing my future so I can look at gifs of Loki on the internet._

_Technically you are._

_I HATE YOU._

The girl sighed internally. _Sheesh, I'll be fine. I'll just improvise and corrupt a word document or something. Stop worrying so much. Idiot._

Common Sense, having been beaten by common sense, resorted to petty remarks. _You're the idiot._

_No, you are. You're the one who kept insisting that I do this stupid essay when there was a really obvious, easy way out._

_...Fuck you. You took your time to think of it._

_Yeah, for some reason I can suddenly think better._

The girl indeed felt better in her head, faint glow of the computer screen permeating her eyelids. Her eyelids didn't feel suffocated any more. In fact, she wasn't sure she could feel anything at all.

_Obviously dream logic_, she thought. _Hope I remember to do this in the morning._

_Whatever, go to sleep. Moron._ Finally Common Sense shut its mouth... head voice... thing. The girl planned to do just what her mind had finally agreed to her doing and allowed herself to float into darkness, letting sleep take her mind.

_Go to sleep,_ intoned a previously unheard piece of mind. It was strange. The voice was rough... and male.

The girl opened her eyes to see her room, exactly as it was in real life, with laptop resting on her stomach with the screen open on iTunes, Welcome to Nightvale having finished. Her desk was on the left side of her room pushed up against the wall, covered in various amounts of crap and artistic supplies as per usual. There was a very large stack of books at its base and a set of drawers containing clothery (as the girl like to put it) next to her desk, its top also covered in various items the girl liked, like dragon models and Master Chief models and Fairy Tail models and lots of models in general. There was a mirror above the drawers, a hiking bag still full of things from the camp her Outdoor Ed class had been on a few weeks ago, and a bookshelf on the far wall. The rest of her walls were covered with various posters and a painting of a girl in a green dress with yellow hair. The girl was quite proud of that painting. It took her for frigging ever to paint and she swore her hand almost fell off, but she thought it turned out rather well.

"Go to sleep," the rasping voice said again, the girl this time recognising it came from the window beside her bed. She placed her laptop on her bedside table and got up, feet not feeling the cold, wooden floor beneath her as she walked the few steps to her window and looked outside. Ordinarily she would be worried that there was a voice right outside her window when her room was on the third floor of her house, but she wasn't since this was obviously a dream, and weird shit tends to happen in dreams. Like breaking the fundamental laws of physics.

The glare from her light reflected her room upon her window and blocked her view of whatever was outside her window. Or maybe it was the window talking itself. You could never tell with dreams. She couldn't see anything in the blackness that was outside except... Was that glare reflected from a pair of eyes?

_Fuck that, I am NOT letting this become a nightmare_, the girl thought as she opened the window and invited the thing inside. She sat back down on her bed and waited, her mind floating lightly upon her thought-winds as it tends to in lucid dreams. She could feel the cotton sheets of her bed beneath her, but she figured that was a real-world sensation integrated into her dream since she was lying on her bed in real life.

At first, nothing came through the window. Then a hand, tentative, cautious; the skin scarred and white and pulled tight over the bones. A head shrouded in a white hood and a white-clothed body pulled itself through the window, then followed legs clad in black pants, and finally, feet. The body stood itself up in her room, and seemed unsure, almost confused.

The girl felt Unease slowly creeping over her body. Slimey, miasmic and thick, Unease slithered through her lightly floating mind, replacing her thought winds with gusts of uncertainty that was slowly increasing her heartbeat and breathing. _Breathing?_ she questioned, quickly followed by _Real world sensation,_ and_ Fuck it's still on the track to becoming a nightmare._

"This has never happened before," growled the voice, sounding slightly bewildered and unsure of how to proceed. The girl noticed then the glint of a well-cared for knife as the body turned to face her.

She saw under its hood and her breathing quickened with a sense of recognition. A man in his early twenties stood before her, messy black shoulder-length hair luscious and straight, face leathery and bone white (and yet for some reason rather soft and smooth looking), tight burn scars making it look skeletal almost as the face contorted into a look of mild confusion as his lidless eyes stared into hers. Confusion doesn't really work with that mouth, the girl thought as she mentally traced the lines carved into his face with imaginary fingers, noting the irregular bumps and mounds that marked the smile sliced into his face from ear to ear. She did not do this in her dream however as she was beginning to feel a little bit terrified staring into the face of Jeff the Killer.

He saw her terror and walked closer to her, face contorting into a gruesome smile, knife subtly held by his side. The girl gripped the sheets of her bed tightly in both hands and muttered under her breath, "You look much better in the manga version of you."

Jeff cocked his head to the side as he gripped her chin, pulling her face up to stare into his. "What did you say?" he rasped.

"I - er, nothing," the girl stuttered. Unease had now grown and flooded her mind, slowly evolving into downright Fear, causing her heartbeat to race erratically and her lungs to hyperventilate, Common Sense mentally chiding her in the background. _Really? That's your coping mechanism?_ The girl was beginning to think that this wasn't a very good lucid dream since no matter how hard she tried to wish Jeff into a puddleduck it did not happen. Her mind felt slurred and slow again, as Fear slowly tightened its newly-evolved talons around her tongue and stole her voice. Jeff idly raised his knife and began tracing lines across her cheeks, like some sacred ritual. "You would look much more beautiful with a giant smile on your face," he decided.

That statement caused the girl's mind to short circuit from Fear tearing apart her systems and resort to her logic which involved relating scary things to the most mundane things she could think of.

"I should do my essay on you," she realised, Fear gripping her lungs and squeezing the words out as blood trickled down her cheek - was that warm? Was that real? "Your myth is a perfect example of social media creating -"

She was interrupted by strange yelping sound downstairs that could be likened to a cat being run over. She was grateful to whatever cat had just died or been seriously mangled as Jeff's head turned sharply away from her face, the knife still resting on her cheek. He seemed distracted and far more alert as he stared at the door, and it was then the girl realised she had been breathing through her mouth the entire time and decided to try to calm her hyperventilating lungs and take a breath through her nose.

A terrible smell saturated her nose, the smell of blood and bone and sunsilk shampoo - strange smell for a serial killer, she thought, but as that wave of smell invaded her being and all her nose could sense became the bitter smell of iron with a subtle hint of a sharper, more flowery scent, her preciously constructed dream-reality shattered faster than glass and she realised that this was not a dream, this was real, and she really had invited a serial killer into her room. Fear was no longer a personified concept but a terrible gnawing emotion that swept over her in waves and electrified her heart, and her mind no longer felt light and slurred. Now it was sharp and downright suffocated with fear.

Jeff stood up, slowly, as if he had forgotten that she was there. He was still staring at the door. The girl noticed another scent had infiltrated the room: a subtle scent of lillies. She tried to calm herself and stop breathing so loudly so that perhaps he would forget that she was there, but he turned and quickly slid the knife between her ribs before walking towards the door, leaving her gasping in shock and falling, slowly it seemed, to the floor. "Go to sleep," he said firmly, before leaving her room. The girl was so shocked she couldn't even scream or cry out for help. And yet, despite the large amount of blood seeping through the wound in her side, she realised she couldn't feel it. Only a steadily growing dizziness preyed on her mind now as all of her fear left her the moment she had to concentrate on saving her own life.

Her face pressed to the smooth wood floor, the girl slowly manouvered her arms (now feeling mushy and drained), beneath her, and pushed herself into a sitting position, leaning against the bed. There was no pain, surprisingly. She knew she should feel it but everything was going hazy and numb. Slowly and shakily she pressed one of her hands against the wound, but the blood still pulsed through her fingers. She was dimly aware that if she didn't do something soon, she would die.

_The bathroom_, her mind muttered as it finally managed to string together an idea from the slush her mind had become. _That pencil thing. The one that stops bleeding. Haemochromatosis? Hypochondriac? Momo?_

_Hemostatic,_ another part of her mind fluttered absently.

_That's the one,_ she fluttered back.

She grasped the end of her bed and forced herself to her feet, stumbling and almost falling back to the ground as she did so. Her legs felt light and airy as if they could just float away on the breeze, like butterflies. She stumbled into the desk, hitting her hip, and used the walls and furniture for support as she staggered uncontrollably across the room to her door. Thankfully, the bathroom next to her room had its own supply of medical items, in case of an emergency her parents weren't around to help with. Her parents were careful like that. Sometimes overbearing, but who was she to complain? Their paranoia was about to save her life.

_They're dead,_ she dimly realised as she fumbled with the handle of the door. _He killed them. I think it might be my fault._

The girl felt strange, like she should be crying hysterically over the realisation that by now her parents and little brother had probably been murdered. Instead in her strange state of detachment she only managed to comprehend that life would probably suck for a while after this. If she managed to live through it. Funnily enough, she also felt a sensation of confusion at Jeff's actions. What was he so distracted by?

She also felt the sensation of falling as the bathroom door (which she had been placing all of her weight on until now) finally opened, and she fell to the ground with a thump. The bathroom was dark and unlit.

The girl realised that at this point she had lost far too much blood and was probably going to die even if she stopped the bleeding. She no longer had the energy to stand up. Her entire body felt heavy and tired, drained. And she also realised that she could attempt to summon Bloody Mary to see if there was any truth to that myth, too.

_You do realise that apart from opening the window that could be the most moronic thing you've done tonight?_ Common Sense chided in her head.

_I'm going to die anyways, I may as well make a last scientific effort to see how real urban myths are_, she replied.

_No. Shutup. Go get the thingy pen,_ Common Sense responded.

_Hematomic_, fluttered the softer part of her mind helpfully.

The girl experimentally tried to lift one of her arms and dimly felt it flop, rubber-like and useless, back to the ground. _Yeah, I don't think that's going to work. Come on, let me summon her. I'm bored. Dying is boring. Too hazy. And now I'm also curious. I'm dead anyways, so I'm sure it won't make too much of a difference if my corpse also has its eyes scratched out._

_Fine,_ Common Sense relented. _What the hell. Everyone else in this house is probably dead by now anyways, so I guess there's no help coming._

_Yep. Depressing._

The girl opened her mouth and tried to move her tongue and failed. She tried again, this time succeeding in wiggling it about randomly. The third time, she remembered to add voice to the tongue waggling and coughed out something akin to "Bludeh".

Face pressed against the mildly numbing tile floor, eyes trying to focus and mind hazy with sleep trying to claim it as it had before, the girl finally managed to get enough control over her tongue to mutter out: "Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary".

The girl focused her gaze on the mirror expectantly. Nothing happened. Disappointed, she allowed herself to drift off to sleep, still dimly aware of her life's blood flowing out from her.

In the cloudy state in which the girl now existed, on the verge of both unconsciousness and consciousness, the girl noticed an overpowering smell of lillies as a voice floated to her through the thick darkness; a woman's, singsong but muffled as though coming from worlds away.

"Don't go to sleep," she cooed. "You won't wake up."

* * *

**Well I hope you enjoyed that. I promise to get far more horrific in the next chapter. It will be fun :3**

******Just to explain the shampoo luscious hair thing in my description of Jeff: It is my opinion that Jeff loves his new look so much he takes extra special care of it. Hence the shampoo smell among all the blood.**

**Please leave a review if you enjoyed since it makes me feel happy and motivated to write more :D**


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